By Robert Laurence “It is never possible,” writes Fayetteville’s Oda Mulloy in the introduction to her just-published memoir, “it is never possible to close out the past.” Far from closing it out, that memoir, “I Grew Up in a Castle” (Will Hall Books, 2012), opens the past up for author and reader alike, a past…

By Robert Laurence Sometimes Michael Heffernan rhymes: “the idiot” (2013) – night with fright – next with unperplexed. And has for a long time: “Lines from the Interior” (1988) – numbers with slumbers – motivated with exasperated. (And later in this poem, he impishly rhymes rime, as in frost, with rhyme, as in poetry.) But…

By Robert Laurence … Or a reader who writes. Take your pick. Padma Viswanathan, who lives with her extended family in Fayetteville and who teaches at the University of Arkansas, is both. And thinks you have to be both, or at least her students have to be, as she leads undergraduates who want to be…

By Robert Laurence They have a reputation to uphold. Thirty years of publication, on-time and never missed. Multiple recognitions of national excellence by the Columbia Scholastic Press Association. Front cover to back, a publication to take pride in. “They” are the editors and writers, the artists and production designers of Connotations, the award-winning literary magazine…

By Robert Laurence Sandra G. Ostrander calls her younger self a “cookie whore,” growing up and doing battle with childhood crisis and teenage adventure in Memphis during the 1950s and 1960s. She has collected her stories and memories of those days into a memoir of a young girl which is, like childhood itself, both chilling…

By Robert Laurence In 1989, Amy Herzberg came to Fayetteville thinking she wouldn’t unpack her bags; her stay would be so short. Today, she’s the Head of Performance, and Director of the MFA Program in Acting at the UA. Ten years later, in 1998, Robert Ford arrived, and is now Director of the MFA Program…

By Robert Laurence In 1963, in Kansas City at the age of 14, Geoffrey Oelsner knows — “senses” would be the wrong word — without being told that his grandmother has a stomach ache. In 2011, in the Evelyn Hills parking lot, Oelsner witnesses a mind-bending telekinetic event, as the locked door of his parked…

By Robert Laurence roberttoddlaurence@uark.edu “A slice of time.” That’s what Adam Vines, assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, is looking for in his poems. A slice of time to capture, to describe, to hold up for inspection, before it flees into the past. And not just the moment alone, but…

By Ben S. Pollock Conway is only the latest stop for the peripatetic Englishman Garry Craig Powell, but he has been teaching creative writing at the University of Central Arkansas since 2004. He walks the talk, too — his novel Stoning the Devil was released in August by the British publisher Skylight Press. Powell will…

Staff Report “Nothing squeezes an idea like boundaries,” says Tom Wilkerson, one of nine writers whose work will be featured Oct. 13 at 7 p.m. in An Evening of Flash Fiction at Nightbird Books. The reading will deliver a series of very short stories — 600 words or fewer — in rapid succession, creating the…